The Normal Times

AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 26-30

Previous Entries: Chapter Four, Chapter Three, Chapter Two, Chapter One, Introduction

This is the final chapter of the first part of Between Two Ages. The purpose of this section was to explore potential worldwide impacts of the transition of major powers from industrial-oriented societies to high-tech service-oriented societies. Reminder, Brzezinski was writing this theory in the late 1960s and attempting to forecast these impacts over roughly the course of the next five plus decades.

To start, Brzezinski states that, on a global scale, the effects of the technetronic revolution are contradictory. The beginnings of this age are synonymous with the beginnings of a global community. A community of vast trade networks, of easier travel and therefore easier access to faraway lands, of expanding knowledge both shared and stolen. At the same time, Brzezinski predicts this age will be fragmenting and that it will come at the cost of an individual culture’s traditional moorings. The revolution will widen the spectrum of the quality of life attainable across the planet, while also intensifying the gulf in material conditions. Within a single nation, wealth disparities will widen. Globally, these gaps will be even greater.

All societies evolved and adjusted in their own ways since the dawn of time. Obviously the Industrial Revolution accelerated these natural adjustments, maybe even corrupted them. Who really knows? That revolution also highlighted the contrasts between different societies starting with the urban and rural lives of any industrializing nation. Cities popped up like weeds, and they became more productive than ever before. While they still almost always kept their slums, these shady corners shrunk in size as unskilled labor found more and more opportunities with every factory that opened. At the same time, mental distress showed a marked increase (suicide spiked) and what sense of community existed was diminished. In rural areas, new technology made for more production in the agricultural sectors, but not without an exodus of unskilled labor and youth to manufacturing centers. Peasants had more options in life than ever before, but they paid for it with the loss of most of their folk-ways.

Brzezinski notes that at the time of his writing, there were still nations living in circumstances that had barely progressed past the Middle Ages. That claim could still be made today to a certain degree. There are even more nations living in the earlier industrial stages, as well as those agra/industrial hybrids where one can access the internet via kiosk but still predominantly uses hand tools to harvest sugar cane. The Technetronic revolution may serve to sharpen these extreme and moderate disparities. The musings and thinkings of a super-Bluetoothed large language model landscape are very unlikely to be similar or reasonable to a chicken farm landscape in a remote village on the Steppes, regardless of whether said farmers have refurbished iPhones or not.

The coexistence of agrarian, industrial, and new technetronic societies, each providing different perspectives on life, would make understanding more difficult at the very time it becomes more possible, and it would render the global acceptance of certain norms less likely even as it becomes more imperative.

Fragmented Congestion

Such a stark three-tiered reality is something Brzezinski believed could strain the weaker social fabrics of his era and lead to chaos both within nations and internationally. The best case scenario that he could foresee is pockets of isolated disruption. Like situations like the youth protests in Corsica a few years ago or the civil war in Myanmar (Burma) that started in 2021. Expressions of mass angst. The worst case scenario is instability in the under-developed nations drawing in more developed nations for the fun and profit of proxy warfare. He spent much of his adult life in Cold War years, and he knew the history what happened in the Balkans prior to World War I (short version: Ottomans collapse and shrink, Hapsburgs, Magyars, and Imperial Russia all feel entitled to their Balkan leavings, Balkaners toil to make the South Slav Kingdom a realized dream and the vultures hate them for it. Except Russia, kinda sorta.) Cold War frameworks are outdated in a lot of ways, but this isn’t so wrong, proxy wars were a thing long before that era.

In the most advanced world the tension between “internal” and “external” man—between man preoccupied with his inner meaning and his relationship to the infinite, and man deeply involved in his environment and committed to shaping what he recognizes to be finite—prompts an acute crisis of philosophic, religious, and psychic identity; this crisis is aggravated by the fear that man’s malleability may permit what was previously considered immutable in man to be undermined. The explosion in scientific knowledge poses the danger of intellectual fragmentation, with uncertainty increasing in direct proportion to the expansion in what is known. The result, especially in the United States, is an accelerating search for new social and political forms.

Would anyone bother to argue that there hasn’t been a massive and multi-faceted identity crisis in the United States since at least the 2010s? Have we not seen that being an honest hard worker doesn’t guarantee job security for an autoworker in Detroit or a data entry worker in Utah? In 2010, I would have said that if you must go to art school (I dropped out of one) you should go for graphic design or animation. In 2025, I am eating those words as graphic designers are made increasingly redundant by AI image generators. And would anyone dare argue that things like Occupy, the Tea Party, BLM, Bernie, Woke stuff and Great Again stuff aren’t products of an accelerated search for new social and political forms? We literally have a whole thought trend called “accelerationism”. We are well on our way down the highway to the tedious zone here. It’s been a gathering storm of fucked paper cuts for a few decades now.

Brzezinski notes that the reality of the United States as the hegemon demonstrates the type of conflicting dynamics that will become sharper as we plod our way into the Technetronic era. The U.S. has spent a mountain of money and military effort on keeping trade channels safe places to pass a boat full of t-shirts and machine parts through, and on crushing oil tyrants who dare march armed forces into someone else’s principality, and on bombing the stew out of places like Serbia so that the West didn’t have to keep thinking about it. America’s social impact on the rest of the world is “unsettling, innovative, and creative,”. American influence makes people abroad hate America, but it also raises standards and expectations of what is possible in a nation. Heightened standards and expectations that many places couldn’t hope to achieve within a single century. Further, this sentiment of anti-Americanism can work to bond people in their attempts to resist its cultural influence.

The impact of these dynamics play out differently from nation to nation, but in the less developed patches of the world, Brzezinski anticipated an intensification of social disruption and regional conflict. The most bare bones forms of mass communication and education access would be just enough to encourage expectations of a vaguely understood Western standards of material wealth that most of these societies would be unable to provide. At least, not for a very long time. In the meantime, political tension would grow and particularly between generations and the classic urban versus rural frictions. Traditional parochial attitudes butting up against the younger, cosmopolitan masses. Where the West deals with the annoyance of increasing political divisiveness, these places will increasingly see organized crime scaling up along with scattered decentralized incidents of violence and further reaching (though still toothlessly corrupted) security infrastructure.

Nationalism, which was still a very strong thought-influence in Brzezinski’s time, would also go to pieces under the pressurizing of a globalized world. Though he notes that nationalist sentiments, and the concept of nation-state, was still a determining factor in matters of military aggression and protectionist economics, as well as a main component of an individual’s self-identification, he sees it as crumbling under the perceived benefits of regional and continental cooperation. Likely he was looking at Europe while he was musing on this. By his time of writing the Common Market was in full swing and a couple of decades after he published this book it would be folded into the newly minted European Union.

An individual in their individual nation-state was already feeling their way around an environment that every year felt more congested, more impersonal, more confusing in the 1960s. Brzezinski assumed this would go on, and the appeal to dig out a familiar, protected corner would become all the more alluring as the process marched on. Under globalism (I should say, Brzezinski doesn’t use this term, he uses more descriptive terms like “global village” “worldwide market”, but it means the same thing), anyway, under globalism nations may be tempted to a similar hidey-hole thought process. By the mid-20th century, new forms of cooperation and social integration were already emerging in the form of telecoms, TV, and radio. Brzezinski notes the potential of this getting turned up to 11 as the gargantuan, archaic computers and “cybernetics” he was familiar with improved over the years. He also saw the potential that national leaders will watch, perhaps, their culture eroding, and thus engage in frivolous economic protectionism over their ancient cheese recipes and fussy booze. Or, they could be looking more furtively over the erosion of their social support systems as travel and relocation becomes increasingly feasible, with working-age people leaving for greener pastures, and decide to import bulk batches of warm bodies in the hopes that they will earn taxable incomes, thus watering down their unique cultures and contributing to increasing civic dissociation.

As a consequence, the Flemings and the Walloons in Belgium, the French and English Canadians in Canada, the Scots and the Welsh in the United Kingdom, the Basques in Spain, the Croats and the Slovenes in Yugoslavia, and the Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia are claiming—and some of the non­-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union and the various linguistic­-ethnic groups in India may soon claim—that their
particular nation ­state no longer corresponds to historical need. On a higher plane it has been rendered superfluous by Europe, or some other regional (Common Market) arrangement, while on a lower plane a more intimate linguistic and religious community is required to overcome the impact of the implosion-­explosion characteristic of the global metropolis.

Such developments as those described in the above quote could be called regionalism, or identitarian, but it won’t look anything like 19th century nationalism. It is born out of a recognition that a more personal, extra-national cooperation being seen as a necessity for the individual. A desire for a more defined sense of personality in an impersonal world. Nations could end up pursuing courses to resist the domination of an external hegemony, but likely such efforts would bring about a diplomatic slap fight over who gets to be the baby hegemon of their respective regions.

But new nationalism won’t be so far off from old nationalism. Brzezinski thought this would be most apparent in the “new” nations. Places likely to emerge as the machine of eastern Socialism ceased to work. We did get “new” nations from such a fall out; the Czech Republic, Georgia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Croatia. Stuff like that. Reborn or re-defined nations where nationalism will still feel like a radical force, one that mobilizes a sense of community but can also easily slip into ethnic exclusions and conflicts. Even in further developed countries, where the nation state may yield its sovereignty bit-by-bit to international banks and multinational corporations whose pencils are pushing analytics lightyears removed from the concept of national boundaries, the psychological insistence of the national community may rise out of an overwhelming stew of contradictions just as it did after the fast times of 1848. Any attempt to establish a balance between the new internationalism and the demand for a more intimate national community may (and has) become a source of friction and fracture.

The achievement of that equilibrium is being made more difficult by the scientific and technological innovations in weaponry. It is ironic to recall that in 1878 Friedrich Engels, commenting on the Franco­-Prussian War, proclaimed that “weapons used have reached such a stage of perfection that further progress which would have any revolutionizing influence is no longer, possible.” Not only have new weapons been developed but some of the basic concepts of geography and strategy have been fundamentally altered; space and weather control have replaced Suez or Gibraltar as key elements of strategy.

If accurate prediction was an Olympic sport, Brzezinski would get a bronze medal for where he saw weapons going. Meaning that some of it gets too sci-fi, but the man deserves credit for foreseeing the Space Force. Most of his weapons tech assumptions were likely obvious conclusions based off the kickass kaboomy stuff the U.S. and others already had in the 1960s. Improved rocketry, more accurate programmed bombs and missiles, more chemical and bioweapons. Some of the rest reads as clownish for now; automated space warships, deep sea forts, death rays, adversarial weather manipulation (if I’m wrong and any of those are real, please correct me, I would love that). His main point seems to be that the one-sidedness of technological development will mean some countries, like the U.S., could come to expect easy, relatively inexpensive victories in most clashes that may come; that such a world could see proxy wars fought by “only a few humans or even by robots” (Drones! Ukraine!); or result in a world where peace breaks out because what is the point of war if the fat cat nation is going to roll in with their barely human operated, low-cost robot army.

That’s all fun and games, but it gets creepy quick. Governments and big deal institutions may be able, and tempted, to exploit advances in research on brain function and human behavior.

Gordon J. F. MacDonald, a geophysicist specializing in problems of warfare, has written that accurately timed, artificially excited electronic strokes “could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth. … In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period. . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.”

Were heart attack guns ever proven real, or is that still a tin foil notion? Are microwaves still scary dangerous? High-capacity transport pylons zooming electricity through the backyards of the rundown parts of town? Joking aside, any creepy tech weapons relevant to social engineering that could come to exist would initially be the possession of the most advanced countries, according to Brzezinski, though once such technology exists it’s only a matter of time before the old models get replaced with new and trickle out through legit sales and black markets. So the underdeveloped world can eventually get their own nukes or laser guns or whatever. While it is unlikely that their powers-that-be would be suicidal enough to use these against a major power nation, there’s a reasonable concern that such weapons would be used for regional skirmishes, or by splinter cell militants against rival groups or government authorities. Something Brzezinski was concerned over was how such incidents would be interpreted by major powers, whether they would be viewed as a broader threat or as that piddly little country’s problem to sort out.

Toward a Planetary Consciousness

For all that nationalism talk, Brzezinski sees the atomized nation-state as an abnormal phase of history. Long before the intelligentsia ever started musing on the concept of nations, there was an essentially transnational European aristocracy of Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Tudors, Sforzas, Hohenzollerns, and oodles of princelings, dukes, earls and whatever else in between. All of them marrying their children off to this or that third cousin in whereverland. In addition to this were the centuries of a church so powerful and far-reaching in influence that it may as well have been another monarchy.

After the dust of World War II settled, Brzezinski saw a new form of transnational elites emerging in the form of international businessmen, scholars, and other popular public figures. These elites were not confined by national boundaries or customs and their interests were more functional than national. As the decades unfolded it seemed inevitable that these social elites from the more advanced nations would be increasingly globalist in reach and outlook. Brzezinski wasn’t living in an online era, but foresaw some kind of “global information grid” coming down the line as computer science progressed. Some sort of electric web that would facilitate “almost continuous intellectual interaction and the pooling of knowledge,”. But a new kind of danger could arise between this neo-aristocracy and the masses that were by the mid-20th century much more literate and politically activated than the kings of old dealt with. Political leaders could find a success in an electoral strategy that cultivates nativist sentiments against such untethered cosmopolitan elites.

Increasingly, the intellectual elites tend to think in terms of global problems. One significant aspect of this process is the way in which contemporary dilemmas are identified: the need to overcome technical backwardness, to eliminate poverty, to extend international cooperation in education and health, to prevent overpopulation,
to develop effective peacekeeping machinery. These are all global issues. Only thirty years ago they were simply not in the forefront of public attention, which was riveted at the time on much more specific regional, national, or territorial conflicts.

The Technetronic Revolution will increasingly create the means to make global responses to the above-mentioned issues and human suffering tangible. And the availability of such means will intensify the sense of obligation to Do Something about such turmoils. The elements of international competition will change. The old yardsticks of territorial expansion, population, claims of cultural or intellectual superiority, and general military power will gradually wane in favor of GDP numbers, per capita income numbers, market sizes and shares, educational opportunities, achievements in the arts and sciences, in research and development, in healthcare, and of course, who has penetrated furthest into outer space. That last suggestion is a product of Brzezinski’s Cold War times, but the rest are much closer to our 2020s reality.

The new ideologies, whose creation Brzezinski viewed as inevitable in a world of mass communications and literacy, would be less simplistic than the old frameworks of social engineering represented in nationalism and socialism. He predicted that many of them would be grounded in preoccupations of ecology or demographics. On ecology, he noted that this had already begun by the 1960s with the rapid rise of environmentalist movements concerned with such things as air and water pollution, radiation, and climate. For demographic anxieties, there were already people fussing about over-population, the containment of disease, and the spread of illicit drug use. One element of the fading ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries would be the appeal of central planning. Modern computer and communication technology would make such planning so much more feasible than ever before. Not merely for the sake of fiddling around with economics and industry, but as a way to cope with perceived ecological threats and natural resource management.

But it won’t be that easy, and it hasn’t been since this book was published. For every wonderful utopian fever dream that becomes realizable with tech advances, there will be whole nations and huddled masses that fear and hate it. There will be governments, corporations, and other associations of assholes who will find dystopian use cases in new tech, who will snoop, spam, scam and stalk. Even if all was good and pure, the amount of information and the immediacy of its access is spiritually overwhelming for many people. Para-nostalgia seems to increase with every major advance in communications technology. In distressed hindsight, the isolated and compartmentalized world of yore appears so much more cohesive, so much more harmonious than the volatility of a global reality. The deep-rooted cultures, the entrenched religions, the smallness of the individual’s world; it all seems like much firmer footing. In the midst of the whirlwind, it is difficult to see what the globalized world has replaced it with. Some cheap stuff, some amazing advancements in information access that seem mostly squandered in favor of algorithmic trend chasers. Some cool medical advancements, but increasingly creepy food. Satellites watch over us from the heavens, but we seem to only feel more insecure. Anomie and ennui seems more widespread than ever and too big to ever fix, whatever that would mean. All that can apparently be done about it is endless internet arguments within whatever bubble a person has slotted themselves into.